Bronco Bullfrog ***½ (1970, Del Walker, Anne Gooding, Sam Shepherd) Classic Movie Review 11,652

Writer-director Barney Platts-Mills’s 1970 British black and white film Bronco Bullfrog (83 minutes, 35 mm) is a commendable and compelling British low-budget drama (£17,000), showing in realist style life as it was in 1970 for London’s East End kids.

It is nicely, if occasionally hesitantly, played by the young unknown actors from the East End, and is deservedly much admired, though little seen in its day.

The plot revolves around the 17-year-old Del (Del Walker) and his group of friends, Roy (Roy Haywood), Chris (Chris Shepherd) and Geoff (Geoff Wincott), who get mixed up with Jo (Sam Shepherd), known as Bronco Bullfrog, just out of Borstal, and they plan a robbery. Del starts a relationship with Chris’s cousin Irene (Anne Gooding).

The cast are Del Walker, Anne Gooding, Sam Shepherd, Roy Haywood, Freda Shepherd, Dick Philpott, Geoff Wincott, Stuart Stones, Chris Shepherd, E E Blundell, Marguerite Hughes, Trevor Oakley and Tina Syer.

Available on DVD in the UK.

The master negative was disposed of in a rubbish skip in the mid-1980s but retrieved by a film laboratory employee who put it in an archive.

In November 1970, 200 members of Leyton’s Beaumont Youth Club jeered Princess Anne and threw tomatoes as she went to the London premiere of Three Sisters instead of Bronco Bullfrog. But a week later she went to see it at the Mile End ABC. Sam Shepherd claims that he was arrested by police for attempting to kiss the princess’s hand and later wrote to her to apologise.

Bryan Forbes at EMI Films rejected it.

It is Platts-Mills’s first full-length feature film. Platts-Mills has made only three more films: Private Road (1971), Heron (1982) and Zohra: A Moroccan Fairy Tale (2010).

Bronco Bullfrog and Private Road were re-released in 2010 by the BFI.

RIP Barney Platts-Mills (15 October 1944 – 5 October 2021).

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,652

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